by jininthenet
Cordo wrote:
I'm continuing to play through my work game slowly as FARC (http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/867919/four-player-session-r...) and my concern about where I think the negotiation rules could break down involves the lack of trade timing rules.
In this particular game, I've been using the Kidnapping special activity to make a challenging situation for my opponents even worse, so I've been thinking about what counter-strategies they could use in order to head them off.
My concern is this -- hypothetically, Cartels and Government could reach an agreement that whenever FARC tried to kidnap that to simply transfer resources back and forth and completely protect themselves from Kidnapping. For example, if Government has 15 resources and FARC starts to implement a kidnap against them, they could trade their resources to Cartel, let the kidnapping resolve against them while they're at 0 resources, then have Cartel trade back all the resources. The quid pro quo being that the Government would do the same for the Cartels if they had kidnapping used against them.
Since agreements are not enforceable by the rules, this would be too dangerous to do in a tournament situation, in which either the Government or the Cartels could simply refuse to return the resources to the original owner. However, in a situation in which you're likely to play against those same people again, players generally will not want to renege on a commitment as that will make other players hesitant to make a deal with them.
In this case a fix would be to only allow trades to or from the "active" player. But even in that case shipments would need to be set aside as a special case.
In this particular game, I've been using the Kidnapping special activity to make a challenging situation for my opponents even worse, so I've been thinking about what counter-strategies they could use in order to head them off.
My concern is this -- hypothetically, Cartels and Government could reach an agreement that whenever FARC tried to kidnap that to simply transfer resources back and forth and completely protect themselves from Kidnapping. For example, if Government has 15 resources and FARC starts to implement a kidnap against them, they could trade their resources to Cartel, let the kidnapping resolve against them while they're at 0 resources, then have Cartel trade back all the resources. The quid pro quo being that the Government would do the same for the Cartels if they had kidnapping used against them.
Since agreements are not enforceable by the rules, this would be too dangerous to do in a tournament situation, in which either the Government or the Cartels could simply refuse to return the resources to the original owner. However, in a situation in which you're likely to play against those same people again, players generally will not want to renege on a commitment as that will make other players hesitant to make a deal with them.
In this case a fix would be to only allow trades to or from the "active" player. But even in that case shipments would need to be set aside as a special case.
Thanks for sharing this scenario, it's a very interesting case. Now that really makes me think even deeper whether there are any other possibilities for players to twist the negotiation rule. And i agree that the timing issue must be clarified.
The second player that consistently plays in my gamer group always like to exploit rules that are loose to his advantage and sometimes it ended up in small argument because sometimes the rules never state clearly what can or can't be done and the timing of certain actions.